Tootfinder

"Face masks release microplastics and chemicals that could harm people and the environment, study finds"
#Plastic #Plastics #Health

Face masks release microplastics and chemicals that could harm people and the environment, study finds
The global use of face masks surged during the COVID-19 pandemic, but many have since been discarded as waste, contributing to land and water pollution.

Face masks release microplastics and chemicals that could harm people and the environment, study finds https://phys.org/news/2025-09-masks-microplastics-chemicals-people-environment.html
Disposable face masks used during Covid have left chemica…

Face masks release microplastics and chemicals that could harm people and the environment, study finds
The global use of face masks surged during the COVID-19 pandemic, but many have since been discarded as waste, contributing to land and water pollution.

Disposable Masks Used During Covid Left Chemical Time Bomb, Research Suggests - WhoWhatWhy
https://whowhatwhy.org/editors-picks/disposable-masks-used-during-covid-left-chemical-time-bomb-research-suggests/

California lawmakers pass bill to ban ICE agents from wearing masks (Lindsey Holden/Politico)
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/11/california-lawmakers-pass-bill-ban-ice-agents-wearing-masks-00559803
http://www.memeorandum.com/250911/p183#a250911p183

FBI busts alleged LA riot leader who was filmed helping to distribute 'Bionic Shield' face masks to protesters (Jennie Taer/New York Post)
https://nypost.com/2025/06/12/us-news/fbi-busts-alleged-la-riot-leader-who-was-filmed-handing-out-bionic-shield-face-masks-to-protesters/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250612/p118#a250612p118

Opinion | The secret immigration police descending on Small Town, U.S.A. - The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/06/11/immigration-arrests-ice-raid-masks/

Flight masks of the Roman Space Telescope Coronagraph Instrument
A. J. Eldorado Riggs, Vanessa P. Bailey, Dwight Moody, Kunjithapatham Balasubramanian, Scott A. Basinger, Ruslan Belikov, Eduardo Bendek, John Debes, Brandon D. Dube, Jessica Gersh-Range, Tyler D. Groff, N. Jeremy Kasdin, Bertrand Mennesson, Brian Monacelli, Douglas M. Moore, Garreth Ruane, Jagmit Sandhu, Fang Shi, Erkin Sidick, Nicholas Siegler, Dan Sirbu, John Trauger, Carey L. Weisberg, Victor E. White, Daniel W. Wilso…

Flight masks of the Roman Space Telescope Coronagraph Instrument
Over the past two decades, thousands of confirmed exoplanets have been detected. The next major challenge is to characterize these other worlds and their stellar systems. Much information on the composition and formation of exoplanets and circumstellar debris disks can only be achieved via direct imaging. Direct imaging is challenging because of the small angular separations (< 1 arcsec) and high star-to-planet flux ratios such as ~1e9 for a Jupiter analog or ~1e10 for an Earth analog in the vi…

Controlling GaN nucleation via O$_2$-plasma-perforated graphene masks on c-plane sapphire
Su Young An, Chinkyo Kim
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08275 https://

Controlling GaN nucleation via O$_2$-plasma-perforated graphene masks on c-plane sapphire
Atomically thin, perforated graphene on $c$-plane sapphire functions as a nanoscale mask that enables GaN growth through thru-holes. We tune the perforated-area fraction $f_p$ by controlled O$_2$-plasma exposure and quantify its impact on early-stage nucleation: the nucleation-site density scales with $f_p$, while the nucleation-delay time decreases approximately as $1/f_p$. Time-resolved areal coverage and domain counts exhibit systematic $f_p$-dependent trends. A kinetic Monte Carlo (kMC) mod…

Template masks for 4D-STEM
Yining Xie, Eoin Moynihan, Marin Alexe, Louis Piper, Ana Sanchez, Richard Beanland
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06371 https://arxi…

Template masks for 4D-STEM
We present a new analysis method for atomic resolution four-dimensional scanning transmission electron microscopy (4D-STEM, in which a diffraction pattern is collected at each point of a raster scan of a focused electron beam across the specimen). In 4D-STEM, each measured intensity has a dual character, forming a pixel in a diffraction pattern and, equally, forming a pixel in a STEM image. Applying a mask to the data to obtain a "virtual" bright field or dark field image is widely used and und…

EfficientIML: Efficient High-Resolution Image Manipulation Localization
Jinhan Li, Haoyang He, Lei Xie, Jiangning Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08583 https://

EfficientIML: Efficient High-Resolution Image Manipulation Localization
With imaging devices delivering ever-higher resolutions and the emerging diffusion-based forgery methods, current detectors trained only on traditional datasets (with splicing, copy-moving and object removal forgeries) lack exposure to this new manipulation type. To address this, we propose a novel high-resolution SIF dataset of 1200+ diffusion-generated manipulations with semantically extracted masks. However, this also imposes a challenge on existing methods, as they face significant computat…

Advancing Medical Image Segmentation via Self-supervised Instance-adaptive Prototype Learning
Guoyan Liang, Qin Zhou, Jingyuan Chen, Zhe Wang, Chang Yao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07602

Advancing Medical Image Segmentation via Self-supervised Instance-adaptive Prototype Learning
Medical Image Segmentation (MIS) plays a crucial role in medical therapy planning and robot navigation. Prototype learning methods in MIS focus on generating segmentation masks through pixel-to-prototype comparison. However, current approaches often overlook sample diversity by using a fixed prototype per semantic class and neglect intra-class variation within each input. In this paper, we propose to generate instance-adaptive prototypes for MIS, which integrates a common prototype proposal (CP…

"…the long arc of history has never been kind to those who rule by force rather than persuasion."
https://www.meidasplus.com/p/court-victory-masks-political-freefall

Court Victory Masks Political Freefall
As the President basks in Supreme Court victories and executive power grabs, his core supporters are peeling away—and the consequences may be deeper than he thinks.

Um, CNN, the whole "secret" part of secret police is that they wear masks and operate outside of the law. There's no "but" there - they are secret police. Warrantless, going outside the purview of their mission by disappearing US citizens, and so on, it's pretty clear what they are. #FuckICE
Imagine being naive enough to write "apparently to protect age…

southpaw (@nycsouthpaw.bsky.social)
This is not an apt moment to use the word "but." https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/09/politics/ice-cbp-police-los-angeles-immigration

Learning Segmentation from Radiology Reports
Pedro R. A. S. Bassi, Wenxuan Li, Jieneng Chen, Zheren Zhu, Tianyu Lin, Sergio Decherchi, Andrea Cavalli, Kang Wang, Yang Yang, Alan L. Yuille, Zongwei Zhou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05582

Learning Segmentation from Radiology Reports
Tumor segmentation in CT scans is key for diagnosis, surgery, and prognosis, yet segmentation masks are scarce because their creation requires time and expertise. Public abdominal CT datasets have from dozens to a couple thousand tumor masks, but hospitals have hundreds of thousands of tumor CTs with radiology reports. Thus, leveraging reports to improve segmentation is key for scaling. In this paper, we propose a report-supervision loss (R-Super) that converts radiology reports into voxel-wise…

Prompt-Driven Image Analysis with Multimodal Generative AI: Detection, Segmentation, Inpainting, and Interpretation
Kaleem Ahmad
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08489 https://…

Prompt-Driven Image Analysis with Multimodal Generative AI: Detection, Segmentation, Inpainting, and Interpretation
Prompt-driven image analysis converts a single natural-language instruction into multiple steps: locate, segment, edit, and describe. We present a practical case study of a unified pipeline that combines open-vocabulary detection, promptable segmentation, text-conditioned inpainting, and vision-language description into a single workflow. The system works end to end from a single prompt, retains intermediate artifacts for transparent debugging (such as detections, masks, overlays, edited images…

Some wear balaclavas. Some wearneck gators, sunglasses and hats. Some wear masks and casual clothes.
Across the country, armed federal immigration officers have increasingly hidden their identities while carrying out immigration raids, arresting protesters and roughing upprominent Democratic critics.
It’s a trend that has sparked alarm among civil rights and law enforcement experts alike.
Mike German, a former FBIagent, said officers’ widespread use of masks was unprecedent…

Bill would force ICE agents to ID themselves, ban most masks (Russell Contreras/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/07/08/ice-agents-masks-democrats-id-bill
http://www.memeorandum.com/250708/p49#a250708p49

Congresswoman Nydia Velšzquez on Saturday held a rally outside a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in New York City to promote her recently introduced "No Masks for ICE Act".
“We would never accept it if the NYPD operated in masks without names or badges
— and we shouldn’t accept it from ICE either,”
Velšzquez (D-N.Y.) said in a statement, referring to the New York Police Department.
“When agents hide their faces and identities they creat…

Velázquez Leads 'No Masks for ICE Act' Rally at NYC Field Office | Common Dreams
"When agents hide their faces and identities they create chaos, fear, and open the door to abuse. Immigrant communities are left wondering if they're being arrested or kidnapped."

Love how no one is wearing masks, not even in medical offices https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/health-wellness/2025/07/30/flu-covid-sleeping-cancer-cells/85418692007/

Deep Feature-specific Imaging
Yizhou Lu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01981 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01981

Deep Feature-specific Imaging
Modern photon-counting sensors are increasingly dominated by Poisson noise, yet conventional Feature-Specific Imaging (FSI) is optimized for additive Gaussian noise, leading to suboptimal performance and a loss of its advantages under Poisson noise. To address this, we introduce DeepFSI, a novel end-to-end optical-electronic framework. DeepFSI "unfreezes" traditional FSI masks, enabling a deep neural network to learn globally optimal measurement masks by computing gradients directly under reali…

Somehow I missed this 2024 Reuters report on how the first Trump administration ordered the US military to carry out a psyop campaign that spread disinformation about COVID-19 around the world.
In particular, the campaign falsely claimed that the Chinese vaccine ChinaVac is unsafe/haram or ineffective. It also doubted the usefulness of face masks. As a result, lots of people died.

Physics-informed neural networks and neural operators for a study of EUV electromagnetic wave diffraction from a lithography mask
Vasiliy A. Es'kin, Egor V. Ivanov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04153

Physics-informed neural networks and neural operators for a study of EUV electromagnetic wave diffraction from a lithography mask
Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) and neural operators (NOs) for solving the problem of diffraction of Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) electromagnetic waves from a mask are presented. A novel hybrid Waveguide Neural Operator (WGNO) is introduced, which is based on a waveguide method with its most computationally expensive part replaced by a neural network. Numerical experiments on realistic 2D and 3D masks show that the WGNO achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and inference time, providing a hi…

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/mit-student-prints-ai-polymer-masks-to-restore-paintings-in-hours/

Democrats push bill that would ban face masks for ICE agents and force them to ID themselves | The Independent
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/democrats-immigration-law-enforcement-identification-b2784771.html

Ex-FBI agent on ICE masking:
“Masking has always been associated with police states.
I think the masking symbolizes the drift of law enforcement away from democratic controls.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/j

If you are so ashamed of what you are doing, or your community so disapproves of what you are doing, maybe you should think about why you are doing it?
And the arrant nonsense of “I do kind of push back on the criticism that they don’t identify themselves,” Lyons said. “Men and women of Ice, and our DoJ partners, and local law enforcement partners who do help us are identified on their vest.” is insulting. The only identification is the word police or ICE . "POLICE" or &…

If you are so ashamed of what you are doing, or your community so disapproves of what you are doing, maybe you should think about why you are doing it?
And the arrant nonsense of “I do kind of push back on the criticism that they don’t identify themselves,” Lyons said. “Men and women of Ice, and our DoJ partners, and local law enforcement partners who do help us are identified on their vest.” is insulting. The only identification is the word police or ICE . "POLICE" or &…

Near-Field Spatial non-Stationary Channel Estimation: Visibility-Region-HMM-Aided Polar-Domain Simultaneous OMP
Thibaut Ceulemans, Cel Thys, Robbert Beerten, Zhuangzhuang Cui, Sofie Pollin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04222

Near-Field Spatial non-Stationary Channel Estimation: Visibility-Region-HMM-Aided Polar-Domain Simultaneous OMP
This work focuses on channel estimation in extremely large aperture array (ELAA) systems, where near-field propagation and spatial non-stationarity introduce complexities that hinder the effectiveness of traditional estimation techniques. A physics-based hybrid channel model is developed, incorporating non-binary visibility region (VR) masks to simulate diffraction-induced power variations across the antenna array. To address the estimation challenges posed by these channel conditions, a novel …

3D PixBrush: Image-Guided Local Texture Synthesis
Dale Decatur, Itai Lang, Kfir Aberman, Rana Hanocka
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.03731 https://

3D PixBrush: Image-Guided Local Texture Synthesis
We present 3D PixBrush, a method for performing image-driven edits of local regions on 3D meshes. 3D PixBrush predicts a localization mask and a synthesized texture that faithfully portray the object in the reference image. Our predicted localizations are both globally coherent and locally precise. Globally - our method contextualizes the object in the reference image and automatically positions it onto the input mesh. Locally - our method produces masks that conform to the geometry of the refe…

Attention #LosAngeles Mayor Karen Bass:
✅ Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson executive order bans law enforcement from wearing masks amid impending immigration crackdown
https://www.

New: a helpful, thoughtful "How-to guide for Covid-safer events", from the Breathe Easy group in Sheffield!
#CovidIsntOver #CovidIsAirborne #CovidCareful #covid #events #AirQuality #masks #Sheffield #England

It’s been nearly a week and I don’t think I’ve seen the NRA using this story about shootng two masked guys claiming to be cops in any of its promotion materials.
https://www.khou.com/article/news/crime/men-impersona…

Homeowner shoots, kills 2 men in ski masks claiming to be officers, HPD says
Two men are dead after police say they were impersonating officers at a southeast Houston home overnight.

Beyond Simple Edits: X-Planner for Complex Instruction-Based Image Editing
Chun-Hsiao Yeh, Yilin Wang, Nanxuan Zhao, Richard Zhang, Yuheng Li, Yi Ma, Krishna Kumar Singh
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05259

Beyond Simple Edits: X-Planner for Complex Instruction-Based Image Editing
Recent diffusion-based image editing methods have significantly advanced text-guided tasks but often struggle to interpret complex, indirect instructions. Moreover, current models frequently suffer from poor identity preservation, unintended edits, or rely heavily on manual masks. To address these challenges, we introduce X-Planner, a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM)-based planning system that effectively bridges user intent with editing model capabilities. X-Planner employs chain-of-thou…

Todd Lyons, the head of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) said on Sunday that
he will continue allowing his officers to wear masks over their faces during their arrest raids.
As Donald Trump has ramped uphis unprecedented effort to deport immigrants around the country,
Ice officers have become notorious for wearing masks to approach and detain people, often with force,
which poses accountability issues and contributes to a climate of fear.

CabinSep: IR-Augmented Mask-Based MVDR for Real-Time In-Car Speech Separation with Distributed Heterogeneous Arrays
Runduo Han, Yanxin Hu, Yihui Fu, Zihan Zhang, Yukai Jv, Li Chen, Lei Xie
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01399

CabinSep: IR-Augmented Mask-Based MVDR for Real-Time In-Car Speech Separation with Distributed Heterogeneous Arrays
Separating overlapping speech from multiple speakers is crucial for effective human-vehicle interaction. This paper proposes CabinSep, a lightweight neural mask-based minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) speech separation approach, to reduce speech recognition errors in back-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) models. Our contributions are threefold: First, we utilize channel information to extract spatial features, which improves the estimation of speech and noise masks. Second, …

What is and isn't legal when ICE officers make an immigration arrest (Arelis R. Hernšndez/Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/07/02/ice-raids-arrests-masks-warrants-kids/?pwapi_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJyZWFzb24iOiJnaWZ0IiwibmJmIjoxNzUxNDI4ODAwLCJpc3MiOiJzdWJzY3JpcHRpb25zIiwiZXhwIjoxNzUyODExMTk5LCJpYXQiOjE3NTE0Mjg4MDAsImp0aSI6ImU1NmZlMjFiLWI1OWQtNDFlOC1iMzQxLTA4MzFiYmQ1ZTk5NCIsInVybCI6Imh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lndhc2hpbmd0b25wb3N0LmNvbS9pbW1pZ3JhdGlvbi8yMDI1LzA3LzAyL2ljZS1yYWlkcy1hcnJlc3RzLW1hc2tzLXdhcnJhbnRzLWtpZHMvIn0.Kh9fZ43UMlhmugo1z9eJs9cIj27qLYFQ4R2_G2mUI7M&itid=gfta
http://www.memeorandum.com/250702/p69#a250702p69

Near-optimal decomposition of unitary matrices using phase masks and the discrete Fourier transform
Vincent Girouard, Nicol\'as Quesada
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20010 http…

Near-optimal decomposition of unitary matrices using phase masks and the discrete Fourier transform
Universal multiport interferometers (UMIs) have emerged as a key tool for performing arbitrary linear transformations on optical modes, enabling precise control over the state of light in essential applications of classical and quantum information processing such as neural networks and boson sampling. While UMI architectures based on Mach-Zehnder interferometer networks are well established, alternative approaches that involve interleaving fixed multichannel mixing layers and phase masks have r…

Genndy Tartakovsky's developing a new show 'Heist Safari' that looks pretty great. Loved what he did with Dexter's Lab. This one's about three estranged frog brothers who meet up at their dad's funeral, have to rob a bank to inherit their late dad's fortune, and have issues when they cut side deals with mobsters. Every episode will be executed as just one shot, the events won't be in chronological order, and it'll have an EDM score. Looks & sounds prom…

Genndy Tartakovsky Developing 'Heist Safari' Animated Series for Adult Swim
Celebrated animator Genndy Tartakovsky — the tooned-up brain behind the adult-comedy movie Fixed (coming to Netflix on August 13), Sony's Hotel Transylvania

In recent months, there have been several documented incidents in which individuals posing as ICE agents have leveraged the opacity and fear surrounding immigration operations to commit serious crimes.
In Florida, a woman has been arrestedfor allegedly impersonating an ICE officer and kidnapping her ex-boyfriend’s wife.
She’s accused of going to the victim’s workplace wearing a T-shirt with “ICE” emblazoned on the front and ordering the woman to go with her.
She then allege…

Federal Lawmakers Demand Information on ICE Agents’ Use of Masks, Unmarked Cars
Rep. Summer Lee says federal agents are “operating like a secret police force.”…

Vance Boelter has shown us the true face of the R-party: murderous, violent, gun-addicted, rampaging, and deceptive.
His act of disguising himself as a police officer in order to deceive his victims makes it beyond necessary for police and other law enforcement to have clear, readable, and accurate identity tags, front and back, that can be read at a distance. And such officers must not hide their identity by wearing face covering masks.
It is critical to both know that a law en…

Reminder: public protest is about visibility, not hiding. The power comes from people being willing to be visible, put their time on the line, and if needed, their bodies.
If you're going to start shit, maybe just ... don't. Direct action of the illegal sort requires careful planning and a tactical and strategic plan for why it will win. It happens sometimes, but it's not the mode, it's not the mode of the No Kings protests. This is a popular, public demonstration of outrage. It's legal (for now, and I hope, ever).
Yes, the police may try to kettle protesters and then trap them into curfew violations in places that have curfews. Masks won't save us from that where it happens. Just running the system with competent representation (and enough bodies to make it A Problem for the system) will.
We don't all need to be masked vigilantes at protests, and in a lot of cases, we need to be worried about the people masking up and starting shit. Remember that this is our opponents current tactic: masked, violent attacks. Don't look like them.

Mathematical Modelling of Face Coverings for Virus Protection
Matthew D. Shirley, Ian M. Griffiths, Joseph Houghton, Lucy Hope, Paul Hope, Christopher. J. W. Breward
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20801

Mathematical Modelling of Face Coverings for Virus Protection
Traditional face masks used extensively, for example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, are relatively impermeable, forcing aerosol-containing breath to flow into the surrounding atmosphere by ``leaking" out from the lateral edges of the mask. This protects close-proximity persons but results in a high viral load being delivered into the air. An alternative face covering, the Virustatic Shield, developed by Virustatic, involves a much more permeable material coated in an active agent, with the goal…

Supreme Court conservatives hide behind their own masks as they upend the law (Chris Geidner/Law Dork)
https://www.lawdork.com/p/supreme-court-conservatives-have-their-own-masks
http://www.memeorandum.com/250724/p42#a250724p42

Beamformed 360{\deg} Sound Maps: U-Net-Driven Acoustic Source Segmentation and Localization
Belman Jahir Rodriguez, Sergio F. Chevtchenko, Marcelo Herrera Martinez, Yeshwant Bethy, Saeed Afshar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00307

Beamformed 360° Sound Maps: U-Net-Driven Acoustic Source Segmentation and Localization
We introduce a U-net model for 360° acoustic source localization formulated as a spherical semantic segmentation task. Rather than regressing discrete direction-of-arrival (DoA) angles, our model segments beamformed audio maps (azimuth and elevation) into regions of active sound presence. Using delay-and-sum (DAS) beamforming on a custom 24-microphone array, we generate signals aligned with drone GPS telemetry to create binary supervision masks. A modified U-Net, trained on frequency-domain re…

Wildfire Fighters, Unmasked in Toxic Smoke,
Are Getting Sick and Dying
The U.S. Forest Service has fought decades of efforts to better protect its crews
— sending them into smoke without masks or warnings about the risks.

Wildfire Fighters, Unmasked in Toxic Smoke, Are Getting Sick and Dying
The U.S. Forest Service has fought decades of efforts to better protect its crews — sending them into smoke without masks or warnings about the risks.

Prediction of Distant Metastasis for Head and Neck Cancer Patients Using Multi-Modal Tumor and Peritumoral Feature Fusion Network
Zizhao Tang (School of Artificial Intelligence, Xidian University), Changhao Liu (Department of Radiotherapy, Xijing Hospital, Air Force Medical University of PLA), Nuo Tong (School of Artificial Intelligence, Xidian University), Shuiping Gou (School of Artificial Intelligence, Xidian University), Mei Shi (Department of Radiotherapy, Xijing Hospital, Air For…

Prediction of Distant Metastasis for Head and Neck Cancer Patients Using Multi-Modal Tumor and Peritumoral Feature Fusion Network
Metastasis remains the major challenge in the clinical management of head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC). Reliable pre-treatment prediction of metastatic risk is crucial for optimizing treatment strategies and prognosis. This study develops a deep learning-based multimodal framework to predict metastasis risk in HNSCC patients by integrating computed tomography (CT) images, radiomics, and clinical data. 1497 HNSCC patients were included. Tumor and organ masks were derived from pretrea…

ICE Lawyers Are Hiding Their Names in Immigration Court #fascism

ICE Lawyers Are Hiding Their Names in Immigration Court
ICE attorneys fighting to deport immigrants are able to obscure their identities — no masks required.

Someone's gonna commit First Degree Glitter with Intent to Sparkle.
#USpol #ice #glitter

Quadratic estimators for unwindowed power spectrum of galaxy-galaxy weak lensing and its application to $P_{\rm gm}(k)$ estimation
Taisei Terawaki, Masahiro Takada, Takanori Taniguchi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.18789

Quadratic estimators for unwindowed power spectrum of galaxy-galaxy weak lensing and its application to $P_{\rm gm}(k)$ estimation
Galaxy-galaxy weak lensing provides a powerful means of measuring the average matter distribution around lens galaxies -- i.e., the galaxy bias relation. Properly accounting for the spin-2 nature of weak lensing distortions, we develop a quadratic estimator for measuring the $E$- and $B$-mode angular power spectra from galaxy-galaxy weak lensing, correcting for survey window effects arising from, for example, survey geometry and bright star masks. The estimator can be implemented efficiently by…

The Space Coronagraph Optical Bench (SCoOB): 8. end-to-end numerical modeling of the testbed to estimate the contrast limits
Ramya M Anche, Kyle Van Gorkom, Kian Milani, Kevin Derby, Emory Jenkins, Jaren Ashcraft, Saraswathi Kalyani Subramanian, Patrick Ingraham, Daewook Kim, Heejoo Choi, Olivier Durney, Ewan Douglas
https://arxiv.org/abs/…

The Space Coronagraph Optical Bench (SCoOB): 8. end-to-end numerical modeling of the testbed to estimate the contrast limits
The space coronagraph optical bench (SCoOB) at the University of Arizona is a high-contrast imaging testbed designed to operate in a vacuum to obtain a contrast better than 1e-8 in optical wavelengths using vector vortex coronagraph (VVC) masks. The testbed performance in a half-sided D-shaped dark hole is 2.2e-9 in a << 1% BW, 4e-9 in a 2% BW, and 2.5e-8 in a 15% BW. While the testbed has met the design specification contrast requirements in monochromatic wavelengths, comprehensive end-to-end …

Subcortical Masks Generation in CT Images via Ensemble-Based Cross-Domain Label Transfer
Augustine X. W. Lee, Pak-Hei Yeung, Jagath C. Rajapakse
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11450

Subcortical Masks Generation in CT Images via Ensemble-Based Cross-Domain Label Transfer
Subcortical segmentation in neuroimages plays an important role in understanding brain anatomy and facilitating computer-aided diagnosis of traumatic brain injuries and neurodegenerative disorders. However, training accurate automatic models requires large amounts of labelled data. Despite the availability of publicly available subcortical segmentation datasets for Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), a significant gap exists for Computed Tomography (CT). This paper proposes an automatic ensemble …

Should ICE Agents Be Allowed to Wear Masks? It Depends Whom You Ask. (Alyce McFadden/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/20/us/politics/ice-agents-masks.html
http://www.memeorandum.com/250720/p61#a250720p61

A non-invasive dry-transfer method for fabricating mesoscopic devices on sensitive materials
Zhongmou Jia, Yiwen Ma, Zhongchen Xu, Xue Yang, Jianfei Xiao, Jiezhong He, Yunteng Shi, Zhiyuan Zhang, Duolin Wang, Sicheng Zhou, Bingbing Tong, Peiling Li, Ziwei Dou, Xiaohui Song, Guangtong Liu, Jie Shen, Zhaozheng Lyu, Youguo Shi, Jiangping Hu, Li Lu, Fanming Qu
http…

A non-invasive dry-transfer method for fabricating mesoscopic devices on sensitive materials
Many materials with novel or exotic properties are highly sensitive to environmental factors such as air, solvents, and heat, which complicates device fabrication and limits their potential applications. Here, we present a universal submicron fabrication method for mesoscopic devices using a dry-transfer technique, tailored specifically for sensitive materials. This approach utilizes PMMA masks, combined with a water-dissoluble coating as a sacrificial layer, to ensure that sensitive materials …

Investigating Vulnerabilities and Defenses Against Audio-Visual Attacks: A Comprehensive Survey Emphasizing Multimodal Models
Jinming Wen, Xinyi Wu, Shuai Zhao, Yanhao Jia, Yuwen Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11521

Investigating Vulnerabilities and Defenses Against Audio-Visual Attacks: A Comprehensive Survey Emphasizing Multimodal Models
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs), which bridge the gap between audio-visual and natural language processing, achieve state-of-the-art performance on several audio-visual tasks. Despite the superior performance of MLLMs, the scarcity of high-quality audio-visual training data and computational resources necessitates the utilization of third-party data and open-source MLLMs, a trend that is increasingly observed in contemporary research. This prosperity masks significant security risks. E…

Accessibility Barriers in Multi-Terabyte Public Datasets: The Gap Between Promise and Practice
Marc Bara
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13256 https://

Accessibility Barriers in Multi-Terabyte Public Datasets: The Gap Between Promise and Practice
The promise of "free and open" multi-terabyte datasets often collides with harsh realities. While these datasets may be technically accessible, practical barriers -- from processing complexity to hidden costs -- create a system that primarily serves well-funded institutions. This study examines accessibility challenges across web crawls, satellite imagery, scientific data, and collaborative projects, revealing a consistent two-tier system where theoretical openness masks practical exclusivity. …

PA appears to be on fire, and that smoke is up here in NYC. AQI is in the 70s-80s, so wear masks out there folks!

California SB 627 amended, passed.
Making a Misdemeanor:
⭐️ANY Law Enforcement officer, state or federal,
“shall not wear any mask or personal disguise while interacting with the public” (N95 ok)
⭐️“require (LE) officers to include their name or badge number on their uniforms”

Ice chief says he will continue to allow agents to wear masks during arrest raids (Michael Sainato/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/20/ice-agents-masks
http://www.memeorandum.com/250720/p39#a250720p39

Deadline-Aware Bandwidth Allocation for Semantic Generative Communication with Diffusion Models
Jinhyuk Choi, Jihong Park, Seungeun Oh, Seong-Lyun Kim
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12701

Deadline-Aware Bandwidth Allocation for Semantic Generative Communication with Diffusion Models
The importance of Radio Access Network (RAN) in support Artificial Intelligence (AI) application services has grown significantly, underscoring the need for an integrated approach that considers not only network efficiency but also AI performance. In this paper we focus on a semantic generative communication (SGC) framework for image inpainting application. Specifically, the transmitter sends semantic information, i.e., semantic masks and textual descriptions, while the receiver utilizes a cond…

VoCap: Video Object Captioning and Segmentation from Any Prompt
Jasper Uijlings, Xingyi Zhou, Xiuye Gu, Arsha Nagrani, Anurag Arnab, Alireza Fathi, David Ross, Cordelia Schmid
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21809

VoCap: Video Object Captioning and Segmentation from Any Prompt
Understanding objects in videos in terms of fine-grained localization masks and detailed semantic properties is a fundamental task in video understanding. In this paper, we propose VoCap, a flexible video model that consumes a video and a prompt of various modalities (text, box or mask), and produces a spatio-temporal masklet with a corresponding object-centric caption. As such our model addresses simultaneously the tasks of promptable video object segmentation, referring expression segmentatio…

State, local officials seek to ban ICE agents' masks (Russell Contreras/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/07/19/states-cities-bans-ice-agents-masks-id
http://www.memeorandum.com/250719/p15#a250719p15

AHAMask: Reliable Task Specification for Large Audio Language Models without Instructions
Yiwei Guo, Bohan Li, Hankun Wang, Zhihan Li, Shuai Wang, Xie Chen, Kai Yu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01787

AHAMask: Reliable Task Specification for Large Audio Language Models without Instructions
Although current large audio language models (LALMs) extend text large language models (LLMs) with generic acoustic understanding abilities, they usually suffer from instruction sensitivity, where different instructions of the same intention can yield drastically different outcomes. In this work, we propose AHAMask, where we simply mask some of the attention heads in the decoder-only LLM backbone of LALMs, to trigger specific acoustic task functionalities without instructions. These masks are e…

Learning Individual Reproductive Behavior from Aggregate Fertility Rates via Neural Posterior Estimation
Daniel Ciganda, Ignacio Camp\'on, I\~naki Permanyer, Jakob H Macke
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22607

Learning Individual Reproductive Behavior from Aggregate Fertility Rates via Neural Posterior Estimation
While age-specific fertility rates (ASFRs) provide the most extensive record of reproductive change, their aggregate nature masks the underlying behavioral mechanisms that ultimately drive fertility trends. To recover these mechanisms, we develop a likelihood-free Bayesian framework that couples an individual-level model of the reproductive process with Sequential Neural Posterior Estimation (SNPE). This allows us to infer eight behavioral and biological parameters from just two aggregate serie…

Towards Interactive Lesion Segmentation in Whole-Body PET/CT with Promptable Models
Maximilian Rokuss, Yannick Kirchhoff, Fabian Isensee, Klaus H. Maier-Hein
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21680

Towards Interactive Lesion Segmentation in Whole-Body PET/CT with Promptable Models
Whole-body PET/CT is a cornerstone of oncological imaging, yet accurate lesion segmentation remains challenging due to tracer heterogeneity, physiological uptake, and multi-center variability. While fully automated methods have advanced substantially, clinical practice benefits from approaches that keep humans in the loop to efficiently refine predicted masks. The autoPET/CT IV challenge addresses this need by introducing interactive segmentation tasks based on simulated user prompts. In this w…

Avoiding gang territory so as to not run into actual criminals, wearing masks, no warrants, and:
ICE Tells Agents They Can Start Making Unjustified Arrests Again | Techdirt
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/06/20/ice-tells-agents-they-can-start-making-unjustified-arrests-again/

SkinDualGen: Prompt-Driven Diffusion for Simultaneous Image-Mask Generation in Skin Lesions
Zhaobin Xu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19970 https://arxiv.org/p…

SkinDualGen: Prompt-Driven Diffusion for Simultaneous Image-Mask Generation in Skin Lesions
Medical image analysis plays a pivotal role in the early diagnosis of diseases such as skin lesions. However, the scarcity of data and the class imbalance significantly hinder the performance of deep learning models. We propose a novel method that leverages the pretrained Stable Diffusion-2.0 model to generate high-quality synthetic skin lesion images and corresponding segmentation masks. This approach augments training datasets for classification and segmentation tasks. We adapt Stable Diffusi…

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on BBCRadio3's #SoundOfCinema
Alejandro Jodorowsky & The Jazz Composer’s Orchestra:
🎵 Holy Mountain "Mattresses, Masks & Pearls"
#AlejandroJodorowsky #TheJazzComposersOrchestra

EditP23: 3D Editing via Propagation of Image Prompts to Multi-View
Roi Bar-On, Dana Cohen-Bar, Daniel Cohen-Or
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20652 https://

EditP23: 3D Editing via Propagation of Image Prompts to Multi-View
We present EditP23, a method for mask-free 3D editing that propagates 2D image edits to multi-view representations in a 3D-consistent manner. In contrast to traditional approaches that rely on text-based prompting or explicit spatial masks, EditP23 enables intuitive edits by conditioning on a pair of images: an original view and its user-edited counterpart. These image prompts are used to guide an edit-aware flow in the latent space of a pre-trained multi-view diffusion model, allowing the edit…

As unrest and military troops overtake Los Angeles, terrifying scenes are also unfolding in smaller communities around the country.
They, too, are being invaded by what resembles a secret police force, often indistinguishable from random thugs.
https://www.washington…

The secret police descending on Small Town, U.S.A.
Masked immigration officials are storming towns and arresting people.

Simplified Aluminum Nitride Processing for Low-Loss Integrated Photonics and Nonlinear Optics
Haochen Yan, Shuangyou Zhang, Arghadeep Pal, Alekhya Gosh, Abdullah Alabbadi, Masoud Kheyri, Toby Bi, Yaojing Zhang, Irina Harder, Olga Lohse, Florentina Gannott, Alexander Gumann, Eduard Butzen, Katrin Ludwig, Pascal DelHaye
https://ar…

Simplified Aluminum Nitride Processing for Low-Loss Integrated Photonics and Nonlinear Optics
Aluminum nitride (AlN) is an extremely promising material for integrated photonics because of the combination of strong \c{hi}2 and \c{hi}3 nonlinearities. However, the intrinsic hardness of the material and charging effects during electron beam lithography make AlN nanofabrication a challenging process. Conventional approaches often require multiple hard masks and a metal mask to fabricate nanostructures. In this letter, we report a novel, simple method to fabricate AlN microresonators by usin…

Adapting Whisper for Streaming Speech Recognition via Two-Pass Decoding
Haoran Zhou, Xingchen Song, Brendan Fahy, Qiaochu Song, Binbin Zhang, Zhendong Peng, Anshul Wadhawan, Denglin Jiang, Apurv Verma, Vinay Ramesh, Srivas Prasad, Michele M. Franceschini
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12154 …

Adapting Whisper for Streaming Speech Recognition via Two-Pass Decoding
OpenAI Whisper is a family of robust Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models trained on 680,000 hours of audio. However, its encoder-decoder architecture, trained with a sequence-to-sequence objective, lacks native support for streaming ASR. In this paper, we fine-tune Whisper for streaming ASR using the WeNet toolkit by adopting a Unified Two-pass (U2) structure. We introduce an additional Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) decoder trained with causal attention masks to generate str…

Border czar: 'I don't particularly like masks, but the agents need the mask' (Filip Timotija/The Hill)
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5475362-ice-officers-mask-debate/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250828/p75#a250828p75

Autoregressive Universal Video Segmentation Model
Miran Heo, Sukjun Hwang, Min-Hung Chen, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang, Albert Gu, Seon Joo Kim, Ryo Hachiuma
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19242

Autoregressive Universal Video Segmentation Model
Recent video foundation models such as SAM2 excel at prompted video segmentation by treating masks as a general-purpose primitive. However, many real-world settings require unprompted segmentation that aims to detect and track all objects in a video without external cues, leaving today's landscape fragmented across task-specific models and pipelines. We recast streaming video segmentation as sequential mask prediction, analogous to language modeling, and introduce the Autoregressive Universal S…

The United States Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California, has filed a criminal complaint against
#Alejandro #Orellana,
a local immigration activist in Los Angeles.
They’ve charged him for distributing face masks to protestors.
They specify that the masks are supposed to prot…

Only Criminals Don’t Want To Be Gassed By The Government
The Tellingly Pathetic Case Against Alejandro Orellana

SemLayoutDiff: Semantic Layout Generation with Diffusion Model for Indoor Scene Synthesis
Xiaohao Sun, Divyam Goel, Angle X. Chang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18597 https://

SemLayoutDiff: Semantic Layout Generation with Diffusion Model for Indoor Scene Synthesis
We present SemLayoutDiff, a unified model for synthesizing diverse 3D indoor scenes across multiple room types. The model introduces a scene layout representation combining a top-down semantic map and attributes for each object. Unlike prior approaches, which cannot condition on architectural constraints, SemLayoutDiff employs a categorical diffusion model capable of conditioning scene synthesis explicitly on room masks. It first generates a coherent semantic map, followed by a cross-attention-…

Homeowner shoots, kills 2 men in ski masks claiming to be officers, Houston Police Department says
"It was just two people and they're masked up and no police cars, no lights or anything like that," said Lt. Khan with HPD.
https://www.

HalluSegBench: Counterfactual Visual Reasoning for Segmentation Hallucination Evaluation
Xinzhuo Li, Adheesh Juvekar, Xingyou Liu, Muntasir Wahed, Kiet A. Nguyen, Ismini Lourentzou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21546

HalluSegBench: Counterfactual Visual Reasoning for Segmentation Hallucination Evaluation
Recent progress in vision-language segmentation has significantly advanced grounded visual understanding. However, these models often exhibit hallucinations by producing segmentation masks for objects not grounded in the image content or by incorrectly labeling irrelevant regions. Existing evaluation protocols for segmentation hallucination primarily focus on label or textual hallucinations without manipulating the visual context, limiting their capacity to diagnose critical failures. In respon…

Homeowner shoots, kills 2 men in ski masks claiming to be officers, HPD says (Sammy Turner/KHOU-TV)
https://www.khou.com/article/news/crime/men-impersonating-police-shot-bellnole-drive/285-931f39d1-2f01-4654-b56a-cc11abaaaf72
http://www.memeorandum.com/250823/p56#a250823p56

ICE agents raiding Los Angeles are wearing masks.
They hide their badges.
They snatch people off the streets in silence.
They disregard the mayor of LA.
They disregard the governor of California.
They answer only to Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, and Donald Trump.
We’re not going to let that happen in the dark anymore.
The Save America Movement is acquiring a fleet of sprinter vans,
hiring camera crews,
and we’re going to follow ICE raids …

I just gave to the Save America Movement!
Join the fight »

SceneGen: Single-Image 3D Scene Generation in One Feedforward Pass
Yanxu Meng, Haoning Wu, Ya Zhang, Weidi Xie
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15769 https://arx…

SceneGen: Single-Image 3D Scene Generation in One Feedforward Pass
3D content generation has recently attracted significant research interest due to its applications in VR/AR and embodied AI. In this work, we address the challenging task of synthesizing multiple 3D assets within a single scene image. Concretely, our contributions are fourfold: (i) we present SceneGen, a novel framework that takes a scene image and corresponding object masks as input, simultaneously producing multiple 3D assets with geometry and texture. Notably, SceneGen operates with no need …

They appeared in plain clothes outside a San Diego hotel,
wore camouflage as they raided a Los Angeles factory 
and arrived with military gear at a Ventura County farm.
The presence of thousands of hard-to-identify federal agents is a new fact of life in Southern California this summer-- as the Trump administration carries out the president’s promised deportations.
Many residents may assume these masked agents are officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE…

Behind the masks: Who are the people rounding up immigrants in California?
The presence of masked federal agents is an unnerving part of life in Southern California this summer. Here’s a look at who’s carrying out the immigration raids.

FocalClick-XL: Towards Unified and High-quality Interactive Segmentation
Xi Chen, Hengshuang Zhao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14686 https://

FocalClick-XL: Towards Unified and High-quality Interactive Segmentation
Interactive segmentation enables users to extract binary masks of target objects through simple interactions such as clicks, scribbles, and boxes. However, existing methods often support only limited interaction forms and struggle to capture fine details. In this paper, we revisit the classical coarse-to-fine design of FocalClick and introduce significant extensions. Inspired by its multi-stage strategy, we propose a novel pipeline, FocalClick-XL, to address these challenges simultaneously. Fol…

AutoPartGen: Autogressive 3D Part Generation and Discovery
Minghao Chen, Jianyuan Wang, Roman Shapovalov, Tom Monnier, Hyunyoung Jung, Dilin Wang, Rakesh Ranjan, Iro Laina, Andrea Vedaldi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13346

AutoPartGen: Autogressive 3D Part Generation and Discovery
We introduce AutoPartGen, a model that generates objects composed of 3D parts in an autoregressive manner. This model can take as input an image of an object, 2D masks of the object's parts, or an existing 3D object, and generate a corresponding compositional 3D reconstruction. Our approach builds upon 3DShape2VecSet, a recent latent 3D representation with powerful geometric expressiveness. We observe that this latent space exhibits strong compositional properties, making it particularly well-s…

Precise Action-to-Video Generation Through Visual Action Prompts
Yuang Wang, Chao Wen, Haoyu Guo, Sida Peng, Minghan Qin, Hujun Bao, Xiaowei Zhou, Ruizhen Hu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13104

Precise Action-to-Video Generation Through Visual Action Prompts
We present visual action prompts, a unified action representation for action-to-video generation of complex high-DoF interactions while maintaining transferable visual dynamics across domains. Action-driven video generation faces a precision-generality trade-off: existing methods using text, primitive actions, or coarse masks offer generality but lack precision, while agent-centric action signals provide precision at the cost of cross-domain transferability. To balance action precision and dyna…

Does the Skeleton-Recall Loss Really Work?
Devansh Arora, Nitin Kumar, Sukrit Gupta
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11374 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11374

Does the Skeleton-Recall Loss Really Work?
Image segmentation is an important and widely performed task in computer vision. Accomplishing effective image segmentation in diverse settings often requires custom model architectures and loss functions. A set of models that specialize in segmenting thin tubular structures are topology preservation-based loss functions. These models often utilize a pixel skeletonization process claimed to generate more precise segmentation masks of thin tubes and better capture the structures that other model…

Beyond Blanket Masking: Examining Granularity for Privacy Protection in Images Captured by Blind and Low Vision Users
Jeffri Murrugarra-LLerena, Haoran Niu, K. Suzanne Barber, Hal Daum\'e III, Yang Trista Cao, Paola Cascante-Bonilla
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09245

Beyond Blanket Masking: Examining Granularity for Privacy Protection in Images Captured by Blind and Low Vision Users
As visual assistant systems powered by visual language models (VLMs) become more prevalent, concerns over user privacy have grown, particularly for blind and low vision users who may unknowingly capture personal private information in their images. Existing privacy protection methods rely on coarse-grained segmentation, which uniformly masks entire private objects, often at the cost of usability. In this work, we propose FiGPriv, a fine-grained privacy protection framework that selectively mask…